“Yeah. You’ll never guess where I found him.”

“We can all guess where you found him,” said a lanky girl with Qin eyes. She sat in the broken shell of what had once been a window, one leg trailing to the street.

“No, you really can’t. I’d lay a bet on it, but I’m not so heartless that I’d take everything you got. Caddie, hey, you got to hear this.” The attractive woman with the wild hair came back into view. She leaned in the doorframe, her chin held high and her face stony, expressionless. “Found him with Abbie,” Sorcha said. He was savoring it, the delivery of all this news. “Lor came back, and he brought this fella with him. Caddie, he came back.”

“What? Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Then where the fuck is he?”

Sorcha shrugged. “Think he’s with the folks already. Abbie said he bolted. Left this one with us.” Sorcha leaned back, angling his body to face the Qin-ish girl in the window. “You guess that? Eh?”

The girl scoffed in feigned disinterest.

“I’m gonna get him settled,” he said. He took my hand in his and started towards a set of stairs I did not trust in the least.

Cadlah whistled. “No one settles here unless they’re with us.”

“Aw, c’mon.”

“My house, my rules,” she said.

“He’s on loan!” Sorcha said.

“No one settles here on loan,” she said. “He wants to sleep here, he’s got to abide the rules. Got to join up.”

I was tempted to say that I did not actually want to sleep there, that I was being forced to sleep there, but I held my tongue. Sorcha sighed. He let go of my hand and pushed me towards Cadlah. “Fine. Whatever. I know you; you’re just doing this ’cause you like stabbing folks.”

My head whipped around to face him. “What?”

He pointed to his ear. The top of his ear was pierced and threaded with a thick gold ring. “Mark of the Natives, right, and now you’re getting one, too.”

Cadlah pierced my left ear. Oh, it was terrible. She sat me down in the kitchen—easily the best-maintained room in the squat house—and pulled a bottle of whiskey and a set of tools wrapped in leather from a cabinet. The tools were medical in nature: a clamp and a long, vicious needle. It also held a set of gold rings. The needle was sharp, but harrowingly thick. She poured a glass of whiskey and dropped in the needle. “What’s your name again?”

“His name’s Ariah,” said Sorcha.